


you, the universe

by laehys



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Feelings, Fluff, Gen, Other, Platonic Relationships, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:54:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28196490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laehys/pseuds/laehys
Summary: A long time ago, between afternoons of running around shoeless in the neighborhood, of trying to climb a small fence to sneak into someone's bedroom so they could watch horror movies together, Jisung had made his place in Renjun’s life.A friendship seemed a term too small for what they had built together. And, yet, something romantic didn’t seem quite right either.
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun & Park Jisung, Huang Ren Jun/Park Jisung
Comments: 8
Kudos: 42
Collections: the rensung files





	you, the universe

**Author's Note:**

> for the rensung fest! thank you to the prompter and all the mods for their hard work~ <3
> 
> #RS042

Renjun misses the time when he could just throw something from his window and it would hit Jisung's window, letting the younger boy know he was being called; he misses the time when he didn't need to find his phone in the mess that was his room, didn't need to match schedules and do other things just so they could _talk_.

He would throw an eraser, his shoe, a little crumpled paper ball — anything. Maybe it would hit the window, maybe it would hit Jisung if he was unlucky enough to have the window open and be laying on his bed, unaware of Renjun's voice calling him, some loud music blasting through his headphones.

And nothing else would be needed.

Jisung would give him back his shoe (the eraser, throw another paper ball at him, lose a pen that’d fall on the grass, in the space between their houses) and they'd race down the stairs until they met on the sidewalk, grins spread across their faces as they gloated about who had won that one round. Jisung liked to say he was the fastest every time. Renjun denied all the claims.

So Renjun misses it. He misses the easier times when they would try stupid things in the middle of the night and they could do that because they were right _there_. A bad idea at 3 AM was okay because your best friend lives in the house next door and they'll accept to do anything you say.

They were easier times and Renjun longs for the simplicity of it all. But he doesn't want to go back to those times. There's a growth in their relationship that wouldn't be there if time hadn't passed, if they hadn't experienced so much together — if they hadn't learned as they stood side by side, talking about their deepest thoughts and secrets.

So Renjun catches the bus with a smile on his face. He chooses a good playlist, something that is light and exciting, something that gets him into a happy mood. It's not as easy for them to meet now, but every single second they spend together is good. And every single second before they can meet is also worth it — because it means they’ll meet.

Soon, they’ll be together.

They don't meet anymore in front of their houses because long ago they had moved apart. Renjun went to another town, came back some years later. Jisung went to live on the other side of the city, close to the old restaurant they always hated. But they monthly meet in front of the parking lot and share a quick smile before they move along together on the old, dusted path.

"Where's your bike?" Renjun asks, looking around them and not finding Jisung's old, scratched yellow bike chained to the fence of the parking lot. "Did someone steal it again?"

The bike was something Jisung had gained as a gift from Renjun's mom a long time ago and no one knew how it had survived until this day. It was ugly and bulky, always seemed to have something broken and a missing part. But it still worked and Jisung was absolutely in love with it. The day the bike was first stolen they had searched through the entire city until they found it in a dumping ground. The next time someone stole it, they chased on foot until they secured it again with bleeding knuckles and gasping breaths.

The bike was precious and Jisung treasured it deeply.

"No," Jisung replies, almost scoffing as if in disbelief. "I dropped something on the garage floor and suddenly the tire was flat. It just happened out of nowhere."

"Out of nowhere?" Renjun repeats, arching one eyebrow. They keep walking through the so very familiar path, climbing up the small hill that would get them to their special place, the one that adorned their childhood memories.

"Out of nowhere," Jisung confirms.

Renjun feels the strap of his backpack digging into his shoulders, creating some tension and forming an ache in the muscles there — but it would all be worth it. It was a small pain in exchange for something bigger.

By his side, Jisung is with a larger backpack, one a lot heavier-looking than his, but he pretends like it doesn't bother him when Renjun asks him about it and all the weight. 

"It's okay. I've been working out, anyway," Jisung answers in an easy-tone. Renjun feels like that isn't the entire truth, but he decides not to comment on that because he hasn't stepped inside a gym since he'd been forced by his roommate five years ago. "I can handle it."

Jisung, in the end, could not handle it.

They both had to drag his backpack through the grass and muddy ground because Jisung had decided not to say that, since his bike was broken, he had walked the entire way from his home while carrying all that weight instead of taking the bus.

"But what if we decide to eat something later in a convenience store?" Jisung had asked when Renjun tried to nag at him for doing something that stupid and suffered instead of doing the easier thing. "I need to save all the money I can! Last time we didn't get all the side plates we wanted because we were short on it."

"Still," Renjun had replied, trying to have the last word even if he felt grateful for Jisung's thoughtfulness and like he would do the same thing if he were in his place. He probably shouldn’t judge and nag Jisung, but Renjun knew he was a hypocrite and he wanted only the best for his friend. "That's a lot on you."

"It's okay."

Many things in life change a lot in a small space of time, but the top of their little hill was as unchangeable as something could ever be. It looked just like it did when they were young kids with skinned knees and sticky fingers, ice cream melting because of the scorching sun. The only big difference was the metal fence at the edge of the hill that overlooked their entire city, thousand of meters down below with their colorful lights.

Jisung is the one who starts to unpack first, laying down a big, comfy blanket over the grass. The moonlight isn't enough for them and the shitty lampposts with their weak lights can never do their job properly, so Renjun is the one who lights up a flashlight so they can actually see things and fix everything around them.

As expected, the flashlight draws in lots of bugs and small insects with its bright light. Renjun makes sure to kill them all before Jisung could see them and freak out.

When he finishes setting everything up, Renjun turns the flashlight off and they lay back on the blankets, heads cushioned by small pillows and their own backpacks.

The sight that graces their eyes is the open night sky in its great glory: stars shine bright just as the moon that greets them among a few, passing clouds. It's a pretty night and Renjun is glad that it's clear enough so they can stargaze successfully.

As their eyes get used to the darkness around them, Renjun can see Jisung's side profile more clearly, can make out more of his features. There's something in him that doesn't ever transform — even as he ages, even as new lines deepen in his face, new marks appearing, there's something about Jisung that is familiar and unchangeable.

Renjun could stay away from him for years and still recognize him because of it, because of this energy he exudes, this thing that makes Jisung be who he is.

"You're staring," Jisung says. He doesn't look away from the night sky, but his lips quirk up just a bit at the corner. "And it's not at the stars."

"You change and, yet, you don't change much," Renjun replies, turning entirely on his side to look at his friend. "There's just something in you that is always the same, Jisung. I don't know what it is, but there's something."

Jisung pauses for a second, but then he looks away from the starry sky and turns on his side too, mimicking Renjun's position and resting the side of his face upon his arms. "I guess it's good to be consistent."

"I mean, yeah, it's good to be consistent, but it's also bad because you aren't growing, aren't transforming. But I don't mean it in a bad way—when I talk about this thing about you, about you being the same, it's something good. Something positive."

Jisung opens a small smile. "I know. You don't insult me when you're being soft, hyung."

Renjun huffs a little, but he doesn't deny that. He keeps staring at Jisung, watching the way Jisung does the same with him. It's not mapping his features because they know each other too much and too deeply to need to do that. Merely an update, maybe. Jisung looks more tired than usual, some new lines forming on his face, and Renjun wonders how he was so lucky to grow old with someone like Jisung by his side.

The silence hangs for a moment until Jisung whispers, "Would you ever move to the moon if you had the opportunity to?"

Renjun scoffs. "Of course. We'd be neighbors there, wouldn't we?"

Jisung opens a big smile and chuckles a little. "Of course we would. And my garden would be better than yours so you'd keep staring at it and would have to ask for my help so you could have the same thing."

"Lies," Renjun says, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. "You'd kill all the plants. _My_ garden would be the best one."

"You don't even know what plants would exist there! Maybe it's a kind of plant that I wouldn't manage to kill quickly! Maybe I would _really_ be the one with a good garden!"

They share a laugh before they resume their original positions, looking up at the sky. Their shoulders touch and Renjun can feel Jisung shivering from the cold breeze.

"You big baby," Renjun mutters, offended at Jisung's behalf that the world decided to be cold that night and make him shiver. "Where's your jacket? Go on, put it on before you freeze to death."

"I won't freeze to death and I don’t need a jacket," Jisung complains, but he does just what Renjun said, sitting up to dig inside his backpack until he grabs the thick material of his jacket. "It would take a while for this to happen. And I'd just steal your jacket before that too."

"You wouldn't," Renjun says. "I wouldn't let you have it."

"Of course you would. Don't lie to me when we both know you would."

Renjun ignores the want to cross his arms and huff loudly. Unfortunately, it seems like this is one battle he can't win. He definitely would give Jisung his jacket and they both know that.

After Jisung puts his own jacket on, struggling to wear it because Renjun keeps pulling it to the side and Jisung can't control which hole his arm is going in, he lays back down, huffing loudly. "You're so annoying sometimes."

"I learned it with you," Renjun teases in a sing-song voice.

"You can't because I learned it _from you_."

"Shut up, you didn't."

The bickering between them is something that fills Renjun with the feeling of warmth and Sunday afternoons. It's familiar, it's good, it's fulfilling and, sometimes, it's all that he needs to feel grounded to the Earth.

Jisung turns his head to the side, quickly, and gives him a small smile before looking up at the stars again — almost as if he had read his mind and agreed with him.

In a world of uncertainty, Jisung is a pillar that Renjun knows he can depend on. He sends him good morning texts and tags him in memes that aren't funny. He drops random Instagram videos with weird filters and YouTube videos about things Renjun had never heard about before. But Jisung also listens to his 14-minute ranting voice notes and reads through the long blocks of paragraphs that Renjun writes when he needs to vent. Jisung gives him a thumbs-up emoji when he drops a new selfie and doesn't judge him when he asks in the middle of the night if screwing a ghost could actually be possible.

"I feel like a fraud because I still don't know the name of the constellations," Jisung says. "We've looked at them for so long but I never learn their names."

"It's okay, we don't need to know their names. Just watching them be all pretty up there is okay too."

Once more Jisung turns his head to the side, watching Renjun's face for a second. Renjun is quick in catching his gaze and laughs when Jisung can't pretend he wasn't looking. "What?" He asks. "What do you want now? I won't give you my jacket—you already have yours."

But Jisung shakes his head a little, the corner of his lip curling up in a small smile. "If we lived together in the moon," he says, "we'd be neighbors until we probably had a big fight or something. And then you'd move to the other side of the moon because you were angry."

"Hmm... I probably would stay there just to try and spite you, though."

Jisung lifts one eyebrow. "Would you?"

"The idea of fighting you sounds weird. Like, not really a small argument but a full-blown fight. It doesn't feel like us, right?"

"You're right," Jisung is quick in saying, huffing through his nose. "It's not us. We know each other too well to fight like that, I think. Or at least I'd like to think so."

Renjun can hear the vulnerability in Jisung's voice, the soft tone it takes, so Renjun looks straight at him, as much as he can in the darkness of the night, with only the moon, the stars, and the shitty lampposts to cast some light around them.

"We do. We've talked about this before, right? This bond we have it's not something that can be easily broken or torn apart..." Renjun swallows dryly, feeling something heavy on the pit of his stomach. Vulnerability is hard and it makes his skin crawl, but the reassurance he always hears back makes it all worthwhile. He knows that. It still makes him hesitate, but he _knows_ that. "I care so much about you, Jisungie. So much."

And Jisung smiles brightly — not the small shy smile, not the polite one, not the one he uses when he's lost in thought and barely hearing what's being said. Jisung smiles wide, the corner of his eyes crinkling, and Renjun feels himself tearing up just because of that.

"And I care so much about you too, hyung," he says, voice so soft, so light, that it could almost be lost with the sound of the wind around them. "So much. You know how important you are, right? How you matter so much to me?"

Renjun can only nod, feeling choked up. He doesn't want to cry, it's not something sad, but the love he feels for Jisung is deep ingrained inside his bones, and every time it surfaces it makes him overwhelmed with how much he feels. "I do," he answers. "And you know how you're so important for me too, right?"

Jisung moves his head up and down, biting his bottom lip for one second, before he smiles again, his cheek squished cutely against his arm. "You aren't only my friend. You don't feel like just the guy from my classes in college. You don't feel like Jaemin-hyung. You're more than that. A lot more than just my friend."

Renjun knows what he means because he feels the same thing and they both had talked about it before.

In a world divided into romantic relationships or friendships, to find something deeper than a friendship and not quite romantic feels weird and almost wrong. It isn't wrong, they learned. People have different ways of dealing with situations, different connections with different people. They're friends but, at the same time, their bond runs deeper than that.

If Jisung asked for something, Renjun would stop anything he was doing to tend to him. Jisung filled a hole inside him that he wasn't even aware of — and, maybe, it was a space that Jisung himself had carved for him.

A long time ago, between afternoons of running around shoeless in the neighborhood, of trying to climb a small fence to sneak into someone's bedroom so they could watch horror movies together, Jisung had made his place inside of him. A friendship seemed a term too small for what they had built together.

"You know it's just the same for me," Renjun whispers. "I wouldn't take the bus in the middle of the night to stay laying on the cold, hard ground just for anyone."

"Yeah. I wouldn't walk to stargaze just with anyone too. You even rode my bike before. That's a very big deal."

Renjun can't help but chuckle, quickly passing his hand under his eye and wiping away a stray tear. "Of course. It's not everyone who'd even want to ride that thing."

"Not everyone can see her beauty and appeal."

Somehow it feels like they aren't talking about the bike anymore, and Renjun just nods. "I guess. It's not for everyone. Not everyone would understand."

Jisung mimics his motion the best he can, with his cheek squished against his arm and kind of laying down on his side. "But we do. And that's really cool, right?"

Renjun looks up at the starry sky, at the moon. Hypothetically speaking, traveling to the moon would take a while and be a difficult journey. He imagines that living there also wouldn't be easy at all. There are few people he can see himself accepting to join the arduous journey with — and there's no doubt inside of him that Jisung would be one of them.

For Jisung, he'd accept doing a lot of things. For Jisung, he'd _try hard_ at a lot of things.

"Yes," he answers. "It's really cool. I'm glad you're here with me. I'm glad we could meet each other and be together like this."

Jisung makes a choked noise, but then he brushes it away with a forced cough. Renjun bites the inside of his cheek, trying not to smile too hard. "There are a lot of stars and a lot of planets and a lot of alternative lives we could be living right now. But being with you is one I'd like to experience in every one of them. You're my best friend, but you're also so much more than that."

Renjun suddenly thinks about deep talks in his room when the sun was setting, the small lamp he had blinking all the colors of the rainbow as they spilled their hearts out for each other, the end of teenagerhood still clinging to their very bones. He thinks about traveling through towns just for quiet afternoons in an ice cream store, knowing looks exchanged over a shared ice cream bowl before they’d see each other off at a train station.

It's about something deeper than what can be fully explained, something they can feel pulsing through their veins with just one look, about mutual support and shared love between one another. Jisung is his friend but Jisung is also more than that.

Love didn't mean just wanting to kiss someone or the affection shared between a parent and their child. There are so many different kinds of love, so many different kinds of bonds and connections, and Renjun feels like he could discover some of them with Jisung too.

The stars shine brightly and they keep watching them, together, side by side. Just the presence of each other, in silence, was comforting enough. Renjun knows he could say a lot, knows he could rant about something, but the fragile space they had built there, with the palpable affection between each other hanging in the air, felt too delicate to be disturbed by something as mundane as talking.

Jisung enlaces his fingers together with Renjun's and all is good. Renjun squeezes their joined hands and feels Jisung squeezing them back. He loves him and he is loved. And the love they share with each other is their own to create the boundaries of what is right and what is wrong.

The next month, Renjun would make the same trip to the parking lot. Maybe on the same day, maybe on another. He'd need to check his schedule to make it work with Jisung's.

This time Jisung would bring his ugly yellow bike and have it chained to the metal fence post, his backpack a lot lighter because Renjun would be the one bringing most of the stuff. Renjun would get rid of the bugs before Jisung could see them and they'd stargaze as they talked about their days, talked about their feelings and thoughts.

And the feeling would never leave him — the feeling of home, of belonging somewhere. The feeling of the sun setting as the sky changed colors, of being enveloped into a warm hug and being told that he mattered.

Under all the lives he could have lived, under all the thousand stars that graced their universe, Renjun was glad he could share this one existence with Jisung and that he had him by his side. That they had each other.

**Author's Note:**

> [ [twt](https://twitter.com/pinkhrj) | [ccat](https://curiouscat.me/rensungie) ]


End file.
